If you are having trouble writing a complex or important idea, sentence or paragraph, a good tip is to say out loud what you are really trying to say, then write those words down.

For instance, what I really want to say is… “This problem is complex with many causes and many solutions”. This gives you a starting point which you can then modify by replacing words, rephrasing, rearranging and expanding. Sometimes you may replace simple words with more formal words, or you may expand a word into a phrase or a whole new sentence.

But you may be surprised – often what you first write down when you say “what I really want to say is”, is good enough to stay, particularly if you have been thinking about the words and ideas for a while.

The “What I really want to say…” technique can be used for a range of written material from sympathy notes to speeches to summary or conclusion paragraphs.

What I really want to say is… Writing can be difficult, but write down something simple to start with. It also gives your editor something to work with.

The third edition of The Australian Editing Handbook, released in mid 2014, is a valuable companion to the Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers. The Style Manual, last updated in 2002, was reviewed in a February 2014 post.

The Australian Editing Handbook has 3 main sections:

• Introduction to publishing
• The basics of editing
• The production process.

The Appendices include sample briefs, editorial checklists, a sample style sheet and proofreading symbols.

Over 400 pages, authors Elizabeth Flann, Beryl Hill and Lan Wang have many helpful tips for both professional editors and writers who want to understand editing and publishing processes to edit their own work. The third edition has updated information on editing in the digital age including a detailed chapter on ebooks.

Recommended retail price is A$49.95, but look online for a better price. You might be lucky enough to find it under the Christmas tree.

Academic publisher Elsevier has released their latest Authors’ Update enewsletter. One of the articles, How to overcome obstacles to publishing in English, has great tips for publishing in the English language.

Elsevier takes a closer look at the challenges researchers from developing and/or non-English speaking countries face when trying to get their work published in journals and determines what they can do to overcome them.

There are seven recommendations for researchers to increase their chances of publication success including linguistic editing. Most tips are relevant to researchers in both English-speaking and non-English speaking countries.

Read this article and more at www.elsevier.com/authors-update

My tip for successful journal publishing is to meet the journal’s requirements in both content and formatting style. If the journal has a specific word limit for articles, make sure you meet it. Don’t make it easy for a journal to reject your article simply because it doesn’t meet the word limit and style guidelines.

It’s easy when writing a document or designing a powerpoint presentation to focus on what you want to tell the audience. This is a great start. But also think about what your likely reader or audience wants to know and hear.

Your aim is to communicate in a way that readers will remember because you have interested and engaged your audience.

What are your key messages? What do you want your reader or audience to do afterwards? Have you presented the information to make it easy for them to do this?

Consider these tips:

• think about your content from the perspective of the audience
• start with an example, fact or image to catch attention and introduce the topic
• change the order of the content
• use the right headings to structure and organise the content
• use language at the right level for the audience
• finish with ways to follow up, get more information and take action.

UPPER CASE or full capitals means typing text, such as a heading, in capital letters. It is used to emphasise the text, but it can be harder to read than lower case text.

With UPPER CASE, all the letters are the same height. With lower case, there is more visual difference between the letters as some extend above the line, such as t and d, and some extend below the line, such as g and y. The greater differentiation between the letters in lower case makes it easier for readers to quickly recognise the letters and words – and the meaning of your message.

Compare these two formats:

• PLEASE READ THIS VERY IMPORTANT AND LONG HEADING CAREFULLY
• Please read this very important and long heading carefully

Headings in UPPER CASE can also be hard to read if they include acronyms, such as WHO for World Health Organisation, which usually stand out as acronyms in text because they are in UPPER CASE.

Make it as easy as possible for readers to get your message. Try to avoid using UPPER CASE, particularly for long headings.

The right time for editing depends on what type of editing you need. If you are paying for editing, you probably want to minimise the number of rounds of editing, while ensuring a high quality final product.

A document may need some or all of these major types of editing.

• Structural editing, advising on structure, content and style to clearly communicate the right message to the right audience, can be done on early drafts of a document.
• Copy editing, checking for consistency in format and style and correct spelling and grammar, can be done closer to the due date. If there are many changes suggested, several rounds of checking may be needed.
• Proofreading, checking a manuscript against the “proof” or version to be printed, is done after the copy edited text and other items have been passed to a designer or printer for layout.

Here are some tips to consider:

• Do as much as you can before passing your document to an editor.
• Be clear about the type of editing you need.
• Be realistic about the editing timeframe and allow time to make and check changes.
• Remember, as noted in a previous post, changes made at the last minute can be more likely to have mistakes for several reasons. Best to avoid a major restructure or rewrite the night before the due date.

After finishing a long document, no-one wants to type a table of contents and get all the headings and page numbers right manually. Create a table of contents the easy way by applying styles to each heading in your Word document and auto-generating the table of contents. Follow these steps.

• To apply styles to headings in your Word file, go to the Format menu, then Style. Apply heading 1 style to the chapter or section heading, heading 2 to the first subheading, then heading 3 to the next level of heading. You can modify the styles to change the look.
• To generate your table of contents, go to the Insert menu, then Index and Tables, then Table of Contents.
• To change the look of your table of contents, modify TOC1 style for heading 1 and TOC2 for heading 2. For instance, you could make the headings bold or adjust the spacing.

Check the table of contents to see if the headings are consistent and complete. If you change the headings in the document or make other changes, simply regenerate and replace the table of contents.

Use the same method to generate a list of tables and a list of figures by applying heading styles to table headings and figure headings.

Knowing how to auto-generate a table of contents makes working on long documents easier.